Holiday homework: Learn your family’s history

The anecdotes had trickled out during her 17 years: Your grandfather died when I was 7 . . . . Your grandmother was a single mother of seven . . . . We spent summers in Vicksburg, Mississippi . . . .

The names of the relations, many still down South were familiar, too. Uncle Mack, the rare bird who combed hair and baked biscuits. Aunt Mary, who got her doctorate in her 60s. Great-Uncle Garfield and Margaret, who kept everyone connected.

But finally, this Thanksgiving, before Blair Roebuck and her family joined a potluck feast including jerk turkey and mac and cheese at a cousin’s in Indiana, she sat her mother down alone at home to ask about her life.

Can you tell me about your parents and what life was like growing up? A little bit about your childhood and what were you like as a child? When you met dad he already had kids, we’re a very blended family, do you like being in a blended family? What is your relationship like with my father?

Sure, the interview was technically homework.

Blair’s history teacher at Lincoln Park High School assigned her juniors and seniors to participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen, using cellphones to capture family stories that’ll end up in the Library of Congress. This is the third year that StoryCorps, an interview project familiar among the faithful of public radio, encouraged high-schoolers to take advantage of Thanksgiving togetherness to record their elders, using a special phone app. The project is free, open to all and continues all weekend at StoryCorps.org.

Blair’s 20-ish minute Q&A in the family’s sunny Humboldt Park house formalized what families already do when gathering for this distinctly American holiday: Tell the old stories. Cram close together. Cook the family recipes. Remember the relatives no longer at the table, those who couldn’t travel. Recount the family’s history.

“My name is Blair,” she began. “I am 17 years old. Today is November 23 and I am speaking with Arnetta, who is my mother, and we are recording this interview in Chicago, Illinois.”

Arnetta Roebuck told her daughter how she was born to parents who came up North in the Great Migration to find better prospects than they’d had in the tiny city of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River.

Her father’s parents had been sharecroppers.

“I can remember as being a little girl that my grandpa owned a store in his community,” she recounted. “And I thought they were wealthy because in that day and age my grandfather had a 13-bedroom house with the store tacked on. That was rarity in the South for an older black guy.”

But Arnetta’s father died when she, the youngest of seven, was just 7, leaving her mother to manage alone. Arnetta’s mother didn’t make it to eighth grade but got a beauty license and eventually landed a job with the U.S. Postal Service.

“She worked nights, so I wasn’t as fortunate as you,” she told Blair.

“I was a little girl wearing cat-eye glasses, cross-eyed, growing up on 16th and Lawndale, which was very, very hard,” she continued. “A lot of fighting and all of that going on in the neighborhood. That’s actually how I ended up going to boarding school; we wanted to find a better venue for learning and safety.”

Blair’s also the youngest of a brood of two older brothers, older step-siblings and two cousins her mother adopted to save from foster care. She was born on a Thanksgiving, just before the rest of her family sat down to eat dinner.

“The first time that you met me, what went through your mind?” she wondered.

“I first met you when I realized I had conceived you,” her mother told her. “I was connected from the first time you were there.”

“You loved me?” her daughter asked.

“I loved you, and I wanted you,” came the reply. “So there.”

That love is one reason Blair’s teacher, Juanita Douglas, assigns the project. The other comes from focusing on unfamiliar angles of well-known topics — say, mutinies on slave ships, in the Honors African-American History class she’s taught for 18 years.

“Students always say the same thing: ‘Nobody ever told us these stories,’” she said. “That’s why the Great Thanksgiving Listen is important, allowing them to think about stories in their own homes, in the history of their own families, glossed over because they’re teenagers.”

Lincoln Park serves students displaced when the Cabrini Green housing projects were replaced by luxury homes.

“Those are stories that are in the making,” she said. “It’s like what you read about in school actually happens in your own home, in your own family tree.”